ESSAY: Who's S-S-Scared?: The Scooby Doo Gialli

The second issue of the Fang of Joy fanzine is hot of the presses (indeed, actual presses [of a sort] were involved this time!). Included within it, among fine pieces from Jose Cruz, Simon Wright, Brad Hogue, one Richard Glenn Schmidt, and many others, is a zine-exclusive essay by yours truly on a particular sub-subgenre of Italian horror-thrillers that I've christened The Scooby-Doo Gialli. Check out the first few paragraphs below and then watch a trailer I've prepared in order to get your further pumped up for your forthcoming purchase. (Is this the first time anyone has bothered to make a trailer for an essay? Is my pat on the back traveling through the post to me as we speak?):

"On Saturday morning, September 13th, 1969, American CBS stations aired “What a Night for a Knight,” the first episode of the Hanna-Barbera cartoon Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! The series would run for 25 episodes, concluding on Halloween of 1970. Each adventure more or less invariably found the meddling teens and gluttonous Great Dane of Mystery Incorporated breaking down in some remote American township and catching wind of a supernatural baddie haunting the area. After much spooking, munching, chasing, and sleuthing, the gang would discover that the supernatural villain of the week was no such thing: it was, instead, always a human in an elaborate costume, scheming towards some money-making human end.

Then, in the early-to-mid-1970s, several Italian and Spanish giallo horror-thrillers—with titles like The Red Queen Kills 7 Times, The Etruscan Kills Again, and Murder Mansion—employed a similar structure on the silver screen, incorporating faux-supernatural menaces into their convoluted plots as cover for nefarious inheritance schemes and psychosexual serial murder. Sure, you’d be hard pressed to spot a van full of adolescent gumshoes anywhere in these films, but the preponderance of red-haired leading ladies and sandy-maned, ascot-wearing pretty boys is certainly suspicious.

Was it merely a coincidence that these faux-supernatural gialli began cropping up immediately after Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! concluded its run on television?

Well, probably..."

Read more by purchasing Fang of Joy Issue #2 for a low, one-time payment of $6.

A Dreadful Decade (Part IX): The Last Will and Testament of Rosalind Leigh (2012) dir. Rodrigo Gudiño

Logline: After inheriting the estate of his estranged mother (Vanessa Redgrave) upon her death, Leon Leigh (Aaron Poole) visits her empty home to gain a sense of closure to their unresolved relationship. Alone in the house and surrounded by her collection of occult relics and decorations, Leon begins to recall his traumatic childhood, during which his mother incessantly tried to induct him into the bizarre cult of angels that she and her husband belonged to. Over the course of the night, the ghosts of Leon's past and the monsters of his present will converge in order to test the strength of his disbelief.

Analysis: There are two different interpretations that we are encouraged to read from Leon Leigh's journey back through his tortured personal history and decayed family relationships. Rather than being antithetical to one another, these separate readings are both required pieces of the same sad puzzle.

At first, we're encouraged to read the haunting that Leon experiences while spending the night in his mother's home as symbolic of him confronting the trauma of his childhood spent with her. We learn as the film progresses that Rosalind subjected the juvenile Leon to borderline sadistic "games" that sought to pressure him into becoming a believer of her occult faith in the power of angels. The rift that formed between mother and son was caused by Leon's steadfast refusal to "play" his mother's game and his eventual flight away from the oppressive coercion she placed upon him at home. Now, separated from his experience for many years, Leon begins to subconsciously doubt his decision, despite his outward gestures demonstrating his continued agreement with the conclusions of his younger self (e.g. putting his cigarette out in an angel statue's stone eye). Leon begins to fear that his mother was right, and that by turning his back on the angels of her faith he has encouraged the angels to give up protecting him from the horrors of the world. Thus, the horrors of the world come scraping at the front door, in the form of a snarling, impossibly long-limbed cat-beast, a creature that could have oozed its sickeningly hairy form from the pages of one of M. R. James's tales. Thanks in part to the rationalizing psychological advice of his girlfriend/therapist as given through various phone conversations over the course his harrowing night, Leon is eventually able to shake off his frightening hallucinations and renew his conviction in the falseness of his mother's beliefs, ridding himself of her cloying spirit and his lingering self-doubts in the process. As a final gesture indicating that he's ready to move on, Leon announces his intentions to sell off every bit of Rosalind's property. This chapter of his life has been completed.

But the film's final moments provide us with the second interpretation of the events that have transpired. Rosalind, who has been speaking to us throughout the film as a disembodied voice on the soundtrack, finally reveals her words as emanating from beyond the grave, rather than from the written last will and testament of the title. From her restless spirit, we learn of her suicide, and how it was motivated by her son's unwillingness to forgive her, the loss of faith that accompanied her belief's inability to set things right, and the subsequent loneliness that crept up on her, "like an animal ready to pounce," over the years spent without her beloved son. We learn that in her continuously cruel desperation to coerce and control her son's feelings, she leaves Leon a suicide note reading, "Do you miss me as much as I miss you?" Finally, we learn that Leon never reads the note, for he never deigns to visit her accursed home, even after she bequeaths it to him. The Leon of the film is Rosalind's fantasy, an imaginative torture she puts herself through nightly as she watches, again and again, her son abandon her and her beliefs, even as she cries out pitifully for him to stay. The ghost becomes the haunted, and rightfully so. Rosalind's inability to understand the effect of her actions on her son, and thus her unwillingness to seek forgiveness or change her ways, marks her for her haunted fate. We could call this existence Rosalind has made for herself a sort of hell, but perhaps not: in her imagination, at least Leon wills himself to remember her, if only for a night.

Technical Merits: The Last Will and Testament of Rosalind Leigh is writer/director/Rue Morgue Magazine founder and president Rodrigo Gudiño's first full-length feature film, produced after creating only a handful of short films prior. Though inventive, his shorts lack the substance to elevate them above their visual gimmicks. What is so surprising about Rosalind Leigh, then, is how confident, controlled, and deliberate its style feels, and what a boon it is to the film's realization of its narrative. Though minimalist by design and budgetary necessity, the film hardly feels like an apprentice effort. Gudiño effortlessly blends long takes, voice-over storytelling, found footage, single location shooting, dodgy (but well-masked) CGI, and documentary-esque explorations of visual space as if to do so were his second nature. You could label the film's freewheeling, ever-evolving style as the product of an overeager first-time filmmaker wanting to cram all of his newly learned tricks in at once, but that feels to me like the wrong assessment. There's a clarity of purpose in the film's every wild and unexpected stylistic shift, as it seeks to make strange once again the horror stories and situations that we've become overly familiar with. I don't necessarily understand every one of Gudiño's stylistic choices (uh, opening credits over the little brother of Kubrick's cosmic fetus?), but I suspect he has his reasons. And, even if not, the cumulative effect of the film's technical experimentation is a breed of weird I can still get behind

Pared down to its bones, Rosalind Leigh contains no plot development or horror set-piece that we could call wholly unique, but the myriad ways in which these familiar elements are presented to us sure make them feel that way. An example: a character calls up a home security company to review the footage from the camera outside the front door of the house he's in. We've seen this scene before in other horror films, and we know it might (very likely) end with the discovery of some fiend or creature barely visible somewhere within the frame of the blurry footage. Gudiño makes this typical scene strange by a) implying vaguely, and without future consequence, through religious music on hold and creepy amateur web design that the security company is run by the mysterious angel cult, b) presenting the customer service representative on the other line as a strangely lifelike computer-generated voice that can seemingly respond to complex human language commands, and c) having this impossibly strange computer be voiced by the very same actor who is speaking to it over the phone. Nothing of any particularly horrific value occurs during this scene, plot-wise -- unless you find a man on the phone sitting at a computer to be a terrifying sight in and of itself -- but the film's off-kilter presentation of the action makes it one of many uniquely disquieting scenes sown throughout the film, sprouting strangeness.

Relevance: As a single-location, (more-or-less) single-actor horror film, Rosalind Leigh bears a certain resemblance to the excellent middle portions of the two adaptations of Susan Hill's The Woman in Black (1989; 2012), in which our lone protagonist wanders around the dreary home of a now-deceased occupant and uncovers curiosities, documents, and recordings that reveal a macabre secret history underlying the present day narrative. But unlike both versions of The Woman in Black, Rosalind Leigh realizes that the isolation and anxiety produced by this haunted ramble can be intensified by never leaving the property. We're given no respite from the subtle terrors lining the walls and lurking behind every door of Rosalind Leigh's unheimlich abode, and this helps make the film one of the stronger examples of horror cinema fascinated with architecture and physical space. Like The Shining's Overlook Hotel, The Innkeepers' Yankee Pedlar Inn, or Session 9's Danvers State Hospital, Rosalind Leigh's grotesque home is essentially the film's secondary protagonist, and exploring the very form and atmosphere of this space provides many of the film's most suffocating terrors. (And, again, unlike those other films, Rosalind Leigh never allows us to fill our lungs with the air from any other location, not even for a moment.)

Also of interest to horror fans is Rosalind Leigh's exploration of the relatively untapped potential of angels as objects of horror. Sure, we can't help but see shades of Doctor Who's Weeping Angels in the possibly animate angel statues of Gudiño's film, but the defining characteristic of Rosalind Leigh 's angels (besides them not being, well, time-energy feeding aliens) is how creepy they act while ostensibly trying to save our souls from an afterlife of torment. That's an impressive feat. The film employs its angels as symbols of the uneasiness you feel when a little old lady on the street hands you a church pamphlet while cheerily informing you that you're going to burn in hell. The horror of these angelic figures is generated from the jarring disconnect between the dual religious messages they impart to their victims, alternately turned towards them with open arms and turned away with grimaces carved upon their faces: If you believe in me, I will comfort and protect you; If you disbelieve, fear the worst. These are the sort of benignly horrific angels that cinema could use more of. They're a welcome development away from the mopey badass angels of The Prophecy (1995) and Legion (2010), and they're just about as frightening as a winged John Travolta in Michael (1996).

A Dreadful Decade (Part VII): The Innkeepers (2011) dir. Ti West

Logline: On the last weekend of the historic Yankee Pedlar Inn's operation as a business, front desk clerks Claire (Sara Paxton) and Luke (Pat Healy) embark on a ghost hunt when not serving their few remaining guests. The two minimum wage workers hope to capture evidence of the presence of Madeline O'Malley, the hotel's famed phantasm, for fun and possible profit. But Claire is soon to discover that the spirits of the Yankee Pedlar Inn are very real, and that they have their own plans to capture her, too...

Analysis: In traditional ghost stories, ghosts aren't created by accident. Fate (or the authorial hand) pushes certain characters-- even on occasion the protagonists-- towards their haunted afterlives, bestowing upon them an existence lonelier than death. Such a fate may seem cruel and unfair, but we can't shake the feeling that these characters are marked for ghost-dom, and that they might lead more productive lives postmortem than they were able to while still breathing.

In The Innkeepers, Claire is already a sort of ghost when we meet her. Her aimlessness and twenty-something ennui places her somewhere between life (or adolescent vigor) and death (the inevitable daily grind). When, early in the film, she flees from the range of the insipid juvenile babble issuing from the mouth of a similarly aged barista (Lena Dunham), we realize that Claire has divorced herself from the concerns of young adulthood, but her inability to even comprehend a life or passion outside of her dead-end job illustrates her failure to assume the (sometimes soul-crushing) responsibilities of being an adult. At one point in the film, Luke accuses Claire of being in the throes of a "quarter-life crisis," but this is news to her: even with the inevitable closing of her place of employment mere days away, Claire hasn't given a moment's thought to her plans post-steady paycheck.

This absence of forethought on Claire's part is because she is exactly where she's supposed to be, among the other lost and purposeless spirits (a widower, an abandoned bride) haunting the Yankee Pedlar Inn. Claire has been marked by fate: as Luke notes, when trying to comfort her, "Everything happens for a reason, Claire. Nobody just winds up at Yankee Pedlar." His aren't hopeful words.

The film posits young adulthood and minimum wage work as a sort of purgatory that one can either aspire a way out of or be trapped in forever. (Though the film also acknowledges the difficulty of making anything of one's self in our busted, post-bubble economy. What exactly is one to do for a "legitimate career"? Open a hotel?) Luke is spared a ghostly existence because at least he's trying, however poorly, to achieve a level of success outside of the doomed inn. On the contrary, Claire subconsciously realizes she has no aspirations, prospects, or literally any place else to haunt, and the end of the business is, for all intents and purposes, the end of her aimless wheel-spinning.

The rotten economy leads to the demise of both Claire and the Yankee Pedlar, but it's the hotel that emerges as the major figure worth mourning. The film imparts to us lots of little intimations that the Yankee Pedlar has a real, tangible history, and that the hotel itself is actively resisting becoming obsolete, forgotten, and unoccupied (it's making new ghosts, after all). And, if we can't bring ourselves to feel sympathy for a woman unable or unwilling to pull herself up by her still-corporeal bootstraps, we can certainly lament the loss of a home for wayward souls.

Technical Merits: Separated by actual title cards, the film's chapters unfurl before us like those of the best supernatural literature: slowly but certainly, like graveworms to the corpse buffet. The Innkeepers abandons the retro style of Ti West's previous films The Roost (2005) and The House of the Devil (2009), but revels in the slow-burn horror of the latter. West's avoidance of a deliberately nostalgic style in this retro-narrative-influenced outing is appropriate, juxtaposing the lurid appeal of ancient history (the historic hotel; the classical ghost story) with the overwhelming sterility and blandness of the modern world (dispiriting economic recession; contemporary horror cinema). Thus, West keeps much of The Innkeepers snail-paced, its exquisitely framed images rolling deliberately, almost fluidly, across the screen. He allows only fleeting glimpses of the supernatural to crawl into his compositions and remind us of the gracefully sinister storytelling traditions wallpapered over by the 21st century's drudgery.

Like all effective horror films (and like very few of its contemporaries), The Innkeepers understands that true horror is not located in the repeated build-up and release of suspense. Rather, horror is generated by mood and atmosphere, by the disquieting framing of the camera or by editing that lingers serenely on the ghastliest of sights just long enough to sear them into our retinas. In this vein, West openly pokes fun at his peers and their over-reliance on build-and-release jump scares: in one scene, Luke spooks Claire with one of the many Youtube videos in which a half minute of silent anticipation is shattered by a demonic shriek and the enlarged image of some variation of Linda Blair's face. Put into comparison with the mastery of the genre's form on display in The Innkeepers, the bulk of modern horror looks roughly as complex and polished as the uploaded shock-video efforts of hypothetical Youtube user dEMonIAC94. Sure, West is rubbing other filmmakers' noses in their own laziness a little bit (even if lightheartedly), but I won't fault him for setting a higher standard.

Relevance: The Innkeepers is a little like Charles Dickens's "The Signal-Man" (1866), if you transported the latter's action from the lonely railroad tracks of England to a lonely historic inn in Connecticut. Both The Innkeepers and "The Signal-Man" are concerned with protagonists stuck in dead-end jobs, haunted by spirits of their own static lives, and ultimately consumed by their inability to extricate themselves from their situations. There's not an exact resemblance between the two works, but Ti West, The Innkeepers' writer and director, is quite obviously paying homage to the tradition of classical Victorian and Edwardian ghost stories that "The Signal-Man" is a sterling example of: quaint, melancholy tales of the relationship between fate and the supernatural.

The film's use of this classical ghost yarn form is important because of its increasing obsolescence in 21st-century horror cinema. Traditional ghost stories simply aren't feasible in our postmodern era. Look at the ghost films of recent years: Paranormal Activity (2009), Ringu (1998), Kairo (2001). Each of these films strives to place the figure of the ghost outside of its familiar territory (no more haunted manors, hotels, moors, or cemeteries) and thoroughly enmesh its existence with the most recognizable elements of modern technology (home video cameras, telephones, VHS tapes, televisions, webcams, and the Internet). The postmodern ghost transcends fixed place and lives out its afterlife digitally through our devices and media; the traditional ghost that The Innkeepers homages is stranded, rattling its chains to deaf ears while irrevocably tied to its location. And the fact is that America's haunted locations are dying. Demolitions, re-modelings, and renovations are eradicating the country's architectural history, replacing buildings of character with antiseptic McMansions, planned communities, and strip malls. At the time of The Innkeepers' release in 2011, Phil Coldiron wrote, "who could imagine a ghost story set in a Courtyard by Marriott?" No one can, and that's why the majority of traditional ghost films produced in the last decade or so (The Others [2001], The Orphanage [2007], The Devil's Backbone [2001], The Awakening [2011]) have been period pieces set in foreign countries, alleviating our difficulty in imagining a contemporary America with standing buildings old enough to have a history.

The ghosts of yore dematerialize with the shuttering of their local haunts, and this is a reality worth mourning. In the for-real operational Yankee Pedlar Inn (est. 1891) and its ghostly inhabitants (both "real" and imagined), West finds dual last bastions worth celebrating, and his film's intelligent drawing of parallels between the demise of historic architecture and the growing irrelevancy of ghost stories demonstrates his fondness for and eagerness to preserve both, if only temporarily. Sadly, but appropriately, he ends The Innkeepers with the image of a door being shoved closed, both literally and figuratively. We could claim a spirit's forceful push was the cause, but the handprints smudged on the frame are our own.

A Dreadful Decade (Part V): Lake Mungo (2008) dir. Joel Anderson

Logline: After the accidental drowning of their teenage daughter (Alice, portrayed by Talia Zucker), the surviving members of the Palmer family have trouble sorting out their collective grief. Their problems are exacerbated by the alleged appearances of Alice's ghost in their home and abroad. This pseudo-documentary seeks to determine the existence of Alice's spectral afterlife and uncover the lingering mysteries of her corporeal days, long buried in the sands of Australia's dried-out Lake Mungo.

Analysis: When we see Alice Palmer in old photographs and video footage, those taken both before and after her untimely demise, we can't shake the feeling that we're looking at a ghost. Perhaps, as the film hints, she was always a ghost, in one sense of the term. We learn over the course of the film that she has encountered her own ghost, has dreamed of her later life as a ghost, and has taken actions that she will later take again as a ghost. Alice Palmer haunts Lake Mungo. The appropriateness of the film's title and its reference to New South Wales' famous dry lake is manifold. At the film's climax, Alice encounters a specter of her future at the dead lake, only to later die in the active waters of another, different lake. Later, she is seen haunting the lake she died in, and yet she was already haunting the dry Lake Mungo while she was alive. Lake Mungo itself materializes within the film as a phantasm, as a visual monument to a place both dead and curiously alive, lingering on as a palpable presence and vacation spot. The temporal circularity of Lake Mungo leaves the dry lake and Alice stuck somewhere between life and death, existence and nonexistence. Lake Mungo laments the tragedy of such a fate, and one way to read the film is as an ode to those sad souls like Alice who can anticipate their own ends through the troubling way they lead their lives. Alice is haunted by her own ghosts: the knowledge that her actions are leading her swiftly towards death and her resignation over the fact that no one can help her, not even those closest to her.

But I think there's a far grimmer reading to be dredged from the bottom of Lake Mungo, one derived not from Alice's personal demons but from the gross negligence of her family in recognizing her trouble before (and after) it was too late. The Palmers loved Alice, certainly, but it's clear they never really possessed any awareness of what was going on in her life. They're ignorant of her fear of death, her use of psychic counseling, and her bizarre sexual affair with the next-door neighbors. We're told of the chilly relationship between Alice and her mother, June (Rosie Traynor), who could never manage to give herself fully to her daughter. After Alice's death, each member of her small family attempts to grieve in a different way: Roy (David Pledger), her father, distracts himself with his work; Mathew (Martin Sharpe), her brother, inexplicably forges fake evidence of her ghost's presence in the family home; and June steadfastly clings to the hope that Alice might not be dead at all. With the exception of Roy (who is eager to forget Alice entirely), the family's expressions of grief are based in the logic of guilt. They don't want Alice to be gone from their lives entirely, because if she is that means they've failed her in some way, and that June's fear that Alice will have died not knowing how much they loved her is fact. Thus, the family colludes to keep Alice alive, in one form or another, until they feel absolved of their own guilt over not being able to help her during her existential depression, of which they were clueless.

It's the act of uncovering Alice's secrets in the year that follows her death that makes her family think they've finally put her spirit to rest. The film's most melancholy and heart-wrenching horror is that they're wrong. In their desire to move on with their lives, the Palmers were distracted by the superficial revelations about Alice's troubled life and were thus unable to see that her deeper problem was her inability to seek solace and assistance within her distant family unit. During the film's denouement, a masterful montage of separate psychic meditation sessions with mother and daughter conducted a year apart about an unknowingly shared dream, we learn that Alice has been trying to communicate to her family her continued existence, to no avail. In the end, her family abandons her, moves to a new house free of her association. But perhaps they had already abandoned her, back when she was alive, sobbing with fright at the foot of her parents' bed but unable to bring herself to awaken them. The film's conclusion leaves Alice's family ignorantly, blissfully sleeping on, and Alice herself haunting empty hallways, alone, in death as in life.

Technical Merits: The effectiveness of Lake Mungo's documentary approach to horror storytelling goes a long way towards lending legitimacy to the documentary/found footage horror subgenre. The film's documentary form suits the material, allowing us to glimpse Alice Palmer only through ghostly family videos and photographs, in which her vibrant life is captured in flat, lifeless celluloid and digital pixels. The documentary form allows writer/director Joel Anderson to keep Alice and her mystery at a distance from us, but it also enables him to slowly unravel a lot of the plot's big revelations in a way that feels organic to the constructed nature of a documentary, and which would probably feel cheap or unearned in a traditionally shot horror feature. Watching Lake Mungo, we're always aware that we're in the hands of a skilled documentarian who wishes to lead us gently from one mystery to the next, with the film's sheen of faux-reality making us feel (however fleetingly) like collaborators, following the leads placed before us. As if we're watching a segment on Unsolved Mysteries, and right before the commercial break we'll be flashed the phone number for the tip hotline.

Much of the film's success as a faux-documentary can be attributed to that fact that it's wonderfully shot and edited, with a keen awareness of the proper balance of static talking-head interviews, moody scenery and location shots, and amateur found footage. Like the best actual documentaries, the screen is subtly kinetic and layered, with the assembled images providing for the viewer a narrative beyond the information given through interview and observation. For the sticklers out there, you could easily (and cruelly) convince a fellow viewer that it was a real documentary (I have!), as it only very rarely stretches credibility or verisimilitude. (The only obvious flaw in this aspect of the film is the repeated occurrence of random folks around town discovering important-to-the-narrative images/figures/ghosts in their barely discernible amateur-recorded video footage. A bizarre, unnecessary form of crowdsourcing, we might say.)

Relevance: If the television series Twin Peaks (and its prequel film, Fire Walk with Me [1992]) had been filmed as a faux-documentary and lost all of its oddball humor, it would look a lot like Lake Mungo. Of course, there's no murder mystery acting as Lake Mungo's narrative backbone like in Twin Peaks, but otherwise the similarities are pertinent: a beautiful, locally adored teenage girl (also with the surname "Palmer." Imagine that...) dies tragically, her family's grief affects the whole town, a mystery (of a sort) is unraveled as the characters discover the seedy secret life of the dead girl, and eventually all gives way to a creepy, half-decipherable supernatural world. This affinity for the intrigue and narrative twists of Twin Peaks-inspired dead teen girl mysteries is actually a partial detriment to Lake Mungo, though not a fatal one. All of the focus placed upon Alice's secrets and hidden quasi-bad girl persona distract from what is, at its core, one of the most emotionally despondent horror films out there. The film drowns itself in sadness, and yet it's no less frightening for its embrace of that emotional tether. Lake Mungo is far from the first film to try to make us feel sympathy for a scary ghost, but it's one of the best at making us realize the crushing, inescapable humanity of those storied chain-rattlers.

Shepperton Screams (Part XIII): And Now the Screaming Starts (1973) dir. Roy Ward Baker

For sixteen weeks, Jose Cruz of The Grim Reader and I will be delving into the complete horror filmography of Amicus Productions and regaling you with our spirited discussions. Below is our mutual consideration of Amicus's AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS (1973). Check back every week for more dialogues and (naturally) more nightmares.

NT: Oh, how I pined for the hoodwinking this premise appeared to promise: In 1795, a newlywed couple takes inheritance of the groom's family estate in the English countryside. Before they have the chance to unpack, the bride is catching fleeting glimpses of a whole assortment of creaky Gothic horrors: a bloody hand bursting out of a painting, an eyeless specter leering through windows, and a decapitated limb wriggling around the floorboards. It's all a little too much too soon, isn't it? This new bride attempts to explain these stupefying sights to her husband and the household help, who fail to take her breathless horror with anything but salt and (worse yet!) seem to be conspiring to keep certain information away from her delicate ears. This bride soon begins to go a little nuts, and can be found wide-eyed and bewildered most waking hours. What are the odds that the bride's new husband has cooked up these assorted scares in order to terrify his wife out of her wits and equally out of some vast bank account or bequest? Pretty good odds, really, if we're at all familiar with similarly spun webs of cinematic intrigue from the past several decades of thrillers. If AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS (1973) were a film that you could step inside, you wouldn't be able to help but notice the aroma of softly burning gaslights infecting the air.

Alas, this is no gaslight thriller. No one is trying to drive Mrs. Catherine Fengriffen (Pete Walker regular Stephanie Beacham) to the madhouse. At least no one corporeal. Her loving husband (Ian Ogilvy) is exactly that, and the aforementioned household help (Rosalie Crutchley) soon enough finds herself victim to the same ghostly presence haunting the lady of the manor. Yes, despite my every wish to the contrary, this is a genuine supernatural thriller. Adapted from David Case's short novel FENGRIFFEN: A CHILLING TALE (1970), AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS concerns itself with a strange curse carried out by cackling phantasms, spreading torment across generations while righting a wrong wrought by antiquated class divisions.

Beyond the slightest intimation that the barbaric behavior of the ruling classes deserves to be countered by the equally ancient customs of the pagan peasantry, we're never informed by what strange magic this curse comes to fruition through. In the Amicus Cemetery of Reanimated Horrors, you might return from the dead through specific occult leanings (voodoo, witchcraft, demonic mirror possession) or you might start sucking air as a vengeful fiend simply because the plot demands it. And the plot of AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS demands a lot. But perhaps this vagueness of supernatural origins is as it should be: this film isn't one overly concerned with narrative coherence. This is a big, explosive Gothic horrorshow (our second true Amicus period piece, though its isolated castle setting means the budget doesn't have to stretch far beyond appropriate costumes and interior furnishings). The frights contained within this cinematic castle of blood are hysterically-pitched, full of melodramatic emotion and overblown action. When, at the film's climax, Ian Ogilvy's Charles Fengriffen fervently yanks his ancestor's skeletal corpse out of a coffin and then swings it repeatedly—grasped at the ankles—against the stone of his own final resting place, we know for certain (as if we didn't already) precisely what sort of frenzied film we're dealing with. I mean, AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS is even the earliest film I can think of containing what we'd call modern-style jump scares. Its setting might hark back to the dusty prestige of 1960s English horror, but in every way that matters AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS is a product of the bolder, more frantic, and slightly sillier early '70s.

Whether or not I fully enjoy the final results of all that I've mentioned above is a whole other tomb full of worms. I'll ponder that query as I bounce the skeleton over into your court.

GR: Once again, you’ve perfectly and succinctly captured my own impressions of our topic as you did with I, MONSTER (1970). The first thing that occurred to me when that great, gory appendage popped out from the regal portrait Stephanie Beacham was observing was “Wow, that was quick.” “Too much too soon” is certainly the case here, especially as the opening credits of AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS (1973), despite that grindhouse-ready title, put you in mind of DARK SHADOWS or any number of the paperback Gothic romances that haunted the shelves of grocery stores and pharmacies of the day with their visions of beautiful ladies trying to elude the shadows of menacing manors. The idyllic shots of the stately grounds, the stirring strings composed by Amicus favorite Douglas Gamley, and Beacham’s soft narration (“…my days filled with fear, my nights filled with horror…”) makes one think that we’re going to be presented with a respectable period piece, one that settles for an aura of barely-repressed sexuality and gloomy expressions of the soul in favor of spookhouse shocks. But the minute the wriggling fingers of the Fengriffen curse make their dynamic entrance, we know exactly what kind of movie this is going to be.

Which is not to say that AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS is a bad picture, but it’s certainly not on the same level of prestige as entertainments such as Bronte’s WUTHERING HEIGHTS (1847) or even, to go back to your point of reference, Patrick Hamilton’s GAS LIGHT (1938). This is a rough’n’tumble supernatural shocker in period clothing, no more sophisticated than any of the similar fare that Amicus has offered thus far. Which, again, is not my way of being a priss about the whole thing, but the bloody hand seems like such an incredibly early introduction of the creepy goings-on in the story that it implies some sense of uncertainty on the part of the filmmakers. They don’t think that the audience could possibly retain interest in a story about a newlywed couple in all their lace and frills, so they throw us a bone with that five-fingered beast in the hopes that we’ll sit up in our seats and say “Gee, now this is a good movie!” In this sense AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS begins very much to resemble a more modern horror film in its almost desperate attempt to capture our attention lest we drift off.

Roy Ward Baker seems a little more comfortable in these antiquated surroundings, his directorship solid throughout in his first standalone horror effort after having turned out ASYLUM (1972) and THE VAULT OF HORROR (1973) for Shepperton Studios. He shows an affinity for both the quieter moments of the piece as well as the more operatic business involving mutilation and rape. It’s those grandstanding moments though that this particular house is built on, but this being a British horror film made by old veterans of the industry it shows us very little skin and a relatively small amount of blood, minus the occasional eyeless, handless specter making its requisite appearance. When one thinks how sleazy AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS could have really been (say, in the hands of Al Adamson or Andy Milligan), what we see on screen seems fairly tame. So, when the filmmakers have no flesh or plasma to titillate our senses with, they attempt to drum up the cinematic vibrato in the scenes of murder and mental anguish which, to say the least, has a tendency to play more goofy than shocking. As a matter of fact, I’ll see your skeleton-thrashing and raise you one old biddy strangled by ghost hands tossed down a staircase… in slow motion. AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS may be game, but as you have observed in the past, that earnestness leads the film to occasionally slip on a putrefied limb and go ass over breeches in its attempt to be taken as serious horror-drama. Still, it’s not without its charms.

Now before I pass out all cross-eyed like Mrs. Beacham, I’ll turn the conversation back to you lest you curse the first virgin bride of my home. 

NT: In an earlier discussion of ours (the one concerning TORTURE GARDEN [1967], to be precise), I made a comment about how Amicus was ushering itself into the era of blood and guts, and that their films were beginning to embrace explicit themes and images about half a decade before their prim and proper contemporaries at Hammer Film Productions would. Having since revisited most of the Amicus films through this collaborative series of ours, I've come to realize I was off the mark. Well, to an extent. The Amicus films we've been discussing so far certainly imply a level of explicitness foreign to the majority of popular British horror at the time, but the on-screen depictions and elaborations of this risqué subject matter have more often been suggestive than visceral. 

By the time we reach 1973 with Amicus, we realize they've fallen behind the times in this regard. Hammer had already made their mammary-laden Karnstein trilogy, and the blood was flowing freely in films of theirs like SCARS OF DRACULA (1970). In contrast, AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS presents to us two off-screen scenes of sexual violence (one perpetrated by a ghost!), some light bloodletting, and a brief shot of a lady's bare back. "Fairly tame" is one way of putting it. You're right: I would much rather see this reconfigured as a decade-appropriate sleazefest. Imagine: Andy Milligan's THE RATS ARE COMING! THE SCREAMING STARTS HERE!

Alas, I've decided that I enjoy whatever small charms AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS bashes against the crypt. Yes, it's essentially applying hoary, William Castlesque spook tactics (minus the gimmicks) in a period package, but that's enough to elicit a guffaw of appreciation from me. It's been surprising to observe how flawed Roy Ward Baker's directorial contributions to the Amicus oeuvre have been (much more so than those of the more-or-less consistent Freddie Francis). As you've written, the film seems torn between its earnest ambitions for producing serious period horror and the presumed pressure to provide its audience with over-the-top frights. As a result, the film manages neither, resulting in it feeling like a bizarre, tonally challenged hybrid of intentions. 

I think the film just barely escapes becoming like the over-serious, ludicrous disaster I saw in ASYLUM (1972) through sheer luck: that film's mini Herbert Lom mannikins were on holiday, so the filmmakers had to settle for the normal-sized Lom causing havoc instead. But, in earnest, I think I'm able to stomach the goofy horrors on display in this picture because Baker and his crew seem to have gained an ever-so-slight sense of self awareness about the zaniness they're putting on screen. An example (and my favorite moment in the film): When the tormented Catherine Fengriffen decides to end it all by committing seppuku (!) or perhaps a home abortion (!!), her stab towards her own pregnant belly is foiled (as a slow pan down reveals to us) by the now-skewered disembodied hand we've seen crawling around the estate since the first reel. As a filmmaker, you don't toss in the antics of Thing T. Thing (of THE ADDAMS FAMILY) without the basic cognizance that you're doing something silly. At least I hope so.

Embarking on a deeper reading of the film's themes seems to me a blind, limbless fool's errand, so I will refrain. But that’s not me condemning it. AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS might be as insubstantial as a pair of wriggling, transparent ghost hands, but those spectral mitts can still play my tune.

GR: Wait. You’re saying there is a deeper reading of the film’s themes? There are themes? 

I jest, of course. There probably is at least a small cauldron full of subtext bubbling under the images of AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS, and while just about any film is worthy and prime for analytical study if you really wanted to make a go of it, as you say it seems a silly task to try and build an academic mountain out of Roy Ward Baker’s mole-hill of horrors. And for the record, I’m copyrighting the title MOLE-HILL OF HORRORS for my next screenplay.

Instead, I shall take the lead that you’ve so efficiently used in the past and simply jot down a few of the fleeting and not-so-fleeting impressions that the film made upon my mind. And since it’s Friday, I’m going to be taking this to a whole new level of laziness by writing these impressions in bullet-format. Can your heaving bosom handle the shocks that I’m sending your way right now? 

• Catherine’s visions of the gory phantom are certainly evocative enough, but they appear to evoke a different mood when, in the midst of making-out, Mrs. Beacham goes all wide-eyed while Ogilvy attempts to calm her down. Snapping out of her stupor, Catherine pulls her husband forward with renewed vigor, hoping that the demons of the past will be repelled by the scent of passion.

• Though she is frightened by a great many beast, including one of the family Rottweilers, at no point in time is Catherine spooked by a dangling spider, as the Miss Muffet headpiece she occasionally wears might lead you to believe.

• The Fengriffen cemetery is charming in its crowded, insular qualities, all crooked graves and creeping vines, but it must be the first that I’ve seen that seems to generate its own strategically-placed clouds of mist.

• Winner of Most Fabulously Dressed: Catherine in her handsome strolling attire, complete with dark skirt, overcoat, and hat, greatly aided by the presence of a riding crop she swings at the wind-whipped grass. It makes me feel naughty. 

• Baker shows he can have a good eye for visuals in those beautiful angled shots of the angry blue sky outlining the dark façade of Fengriffen Manor.

• Upon seeing a woodcut-style illustration of a bare-chested woman lying in bed as a horned fiend lurks before her, Peter Cushing’s Dr. Poe feels the need to clearly define what we are seeing with a grim whisper: “Sexual relations with demons.” Yeah, thanks for that.

• Winner of Most Fabulous Line of Dialogue: “I live in horror that this is the child of a ghost.”

• What’s the deal with that ghost anyway? His handlessness seems to indicate that he is the avenging woodsman, but his eyelessness implies that he is that spirit’s descendant Silas (also Whitehead), who has his peepers shot through the back of his skull when the frenzied Ogilvy brings an end to his smirking ways with twin pistols. In a film wrought with conflicting ideas, they can’t even settle on whose ghost is haunting the house!

• For all of its appealing missteps, the film actually generates potent tension and uneasiness during the scene where Herbert Lom’s wicked Henry defiles the bride of his groundskeeper (Geoffrey Whitehead) as the helpless groom is forced to watch. The latter’s behanding by axe is equally chilling as Whitehead doesn’t emit a gasp or a choke as his limb is lopped off, his hatred for his master more intense than any physical trauma he could possibly suffer. The whole scenario is slightly reminiscent of the family backstory from Arthur Conan Doyle’s THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES. And if you expect me to make a terrible HAND OF THE BASKERVILLES joke, you can forget about it. Wait.

• …but as effective as the inciting event of the curse is, the bedevilment itself is somewhat perplexing, as the groundskeeper’s curse attacks not the direct perpetrator of the crime but some random and for-all-he-knows completely innocent woman in the future who has nothing to do with the heinous act itself. I understand that this may be the “point,” as the woodsman’s wife was herself an innocent unwillingly drawn into the madness of the Fengriffen family, but as a means of payback against the man who raped his wife it’s pretty shitty. 

• …however, it does make for a fittingly bleak climax that has the ever-stunned Catherine behold her newly-born babe to see that it bears the same red birthmark on its face as the one that Silas’ family line possessed, in addition to a missing hand. It’s interesting to note the differences one sees in Catherine’s and Rosemary Woodhouse’s reactions to their progeny. For a woman who literally bore the son of Satan, Rosemary takes on the prospect of motherhood in stride when compared to the catatonic Catherine. Maybe it’s just the changing of the times. Maybe it’s because not everyone’s fit to be a parent.

• And for all of those trials and tribulations, the sacrifice and the terror that she went through during the film’s ninety minutes, Stephanie Beacham is awarded in the final credits with the prestigious place of fourth-billing.

Fin.

Next week: Madhouse (1974)

The Stone Tape (1972) dir. Peter Sasdy

Logline: A group of audio recording engineers and scientists move their operations into Taskerlands, an abandoned Victorian mansion, in order to continue in isolation their research into a new recording medium. What they soon discover is that the crumbling stone walls of Taskerlands have their own ancient recording techniques: those that will pipe the ghosts of a thousand years through their screaming headphones.

Though the great English scriptwriter Nigel Kneale is probably best known abroad for his feature work (particularly for his stint with Hammer Films), it's no big secret that his best work was for television. The Quatermass serials (1953-1979), Beasts (1976), The Year of the Sex Olympics (1968), Murrain (1975), and The Woman in Black (1989) all bear his credit, and each is a distinct classic of British television drama. Chief among those small screen wonders, and the smartest, most perceptive piece of horror Kneale ever wrote, is The Stone Tape, scripted by Kneale and directed by Hammer regular Peter Sasdy (Hands of the Ripper (1971)). Though originally produced for inclusion in the Dead of Night series, The Stone Tape was ultimately broadcast by the BBC independent of that series banner (Dead of Night had been canceled by then) on Christmas day, 1972. (That evening so happened to be the one immediately after Lawrence Gordon Clark's A Warning to the Curious premiered on the BBC, which makes Kneale and Sasdy's film a sort of unofficial second entry in the A Ghost Story for Christmas series that year. It also makes December of 1972 a damn good year for British television horror). The film is an expertly crafted variation on a theme that Kneale had been working through in pieces like Quatermass & the Pit (1958-9; 1967) and his now-lost TV play The Road (1963): those shadowy, elusive junctures in which science and the supernatural butt heads. Kneale's particular breed of scientific horror and his theme of Ancient Superstition vs. Modern Technology can be traced back in print as far as Dracula (1897) but can be witnessed growing contemporaneously in cinema with the likes of simpler scientific-superstitious fare such as The Werewolf (1956) and The Vampire (1957) in the States. But Kneale's interest in these concepts goes far beyond the novelty inherent in melding the science fiction and horror genres: his efforts in placing the two side by side strive to demonstrate the essential similarity of modern science and ancient superstition through their shared inability to explain what goes bump in the night.

The Stone Tape is in many ways a typical ghost story. The struggle of methods between Peter (Michael Bryant) and Jill (Jane Asher) in provoking the ghost into action contrasts technological brute force with natural sensitivity to the supernatural, as these tales often do (see: The Haunting (1963), The Legend of Hell House (1973)). Furthermore, the film also features the same sort of precognition of a character's fated death and eventual ghostly afterlife as seen in tales as far apart as The Signalman (published 1866; filmed 1976) and The Innkeepers (2011). (Even then, the story doesn't fall totally into the recognized ghost story patterns: the revelation that underneath the surface haunting lurks a formless, prehistoric evil is downright Lovecraftian.) But the film's satisfying if traditional story and predictable plot progression belie the much more fascinating aesthetics that Kneale and Sasdy fuse into its production.

The setting is the most apparent visual signifier of the film's atypical themes. Taskerlands is a disquieting marvel of incongruous set design, all the more impressive for being constructed on a limited television production budget. The old Victorian mansion (which, as we discover, is built on even older Saxon foundations) has been partially renovated by our research team, creating sterile modern laboratories of some rooms while leaving others down the corridor in their weathered, dilapidated original states. This results in the feeling that as we travel from one room to the next we're being led back and forth between modernity and antiquity: the researchers are toiling over their inscrutable machines and printed data while next door a ghost is screaming in an unlit stone room. The building becomes a structural anachronism, a large-scale palimpsest in which the past may be written over but is never truly erased. This deliberate commingling of the old and the new extends also to the film's musical score, produced exclusively by aide of an electronic organ playing dated melodies. 

Writing of the film's deliberate aesthetics, it's also important to note the obvious: The Stone Tape is shot on video for television broadcast. Shooting a traditional ghost story with a relatively new technology produces a curious effect in the viewer when the action takes a turn for the spooky: the ghost appears at the top of a staircase as a flickering video artifact, pulsating with static as the recording progresses, and later, during the climactic events, Jill is tormented by a coterie of demonic, video-derived special effects. The fact that this visual style appears dated from our twenty-first century perspective is curiously appropriate considering the film's characters' assertions that magnetic tape is a fragile, obsolete medium. But, seeing what we've seen, can we call it obsolete, or merely the latest iteration of a recording technology that has always been with us? The film's core concept of stone (specifically, common ragstone) acting as a magnetic tape-like recording medium that can preserve and replay moments of high emotion (or unfathomable evil) is beguiling in its implications. 

In one sense, the notion of the stone tape reveals the illusion of technological progress in understanding reality. The film argues that contrary to popular thought, technology has not allowed us to escape superstition within modernity, nor does it really grant us the ability to explain or interpret the supernatural (much of the science behind the haunting and its recording remains unclear by the film's end). The conclusions drawn from all of the research team's efforts are no more illuminating than those that could be derived from a spirit board, and the discovery that the new technology the team is seeking is several thousand years old (and obstinately untechnical) provides a sobering evaluation of the group's work (the company that employs them ultimately decides that research into the development of a new washing machine is more valuable). Moreover, the revelation of ghosts being recordings rather than sentient non-physical entities says something very profound about horror cinema itself: whether in drawing, text, or film, recordings of horror have always been with us and always will, replaying themselves endlessly to those poor or sick souls most sensitive and receptive to them. As The Stone Tape itself demonstrates with its sly employment and update of the traditional English ghost story, these recorded horrors may be written over in history with seemingly newer and fresher horrors as time progresses, but the old models of fright are always shambling, fuzzily, with a horrific lack of definition, somewhere beneath the tape's layers.

The Exorcism (1972) dir. Don Taylor

from the BBC's Dead of Night

Logline: Two upper-middle class couples retreat to a refurbished country house for the weekend. All seems well until the lights go out and the wine begins to taste like blood: for this house had a previous occupant, and she's not soon to let her and her children be forgotten.

"The Exorcism" was the first short film to be broadcast in the fall of 1972 under the masthead of BBC2's short-lived horror anthology series Dead of Night. Of the seven episodes produced for the series, only three have survived past their initial broadcast, the rest having fallen victim to the BBC's reckless tape scrubbing practices of the era. (These three are now available on home video thanks to the tireless efforts of the BFI.) If "The Exorcism" is in any way indicative of the relative quality of those lost episodes, then their deletion is a tremendous tragedy. Written and directed by Don Taylor (who would go on to direct "During Barty's Party" and "Buddy Boy," the two most peculiar and formally innovative installments of Nigel Kneale's Beasts (1976)), this inaugural entry balances its creeping supernatural unease with damning (if slightly blunt) social criticism of the middle class for their ignorance of the history of England's rural strife and for tastelessly encroaching upon the land and homes that now serve as those poor folks' mausoleums.

It begins with a set-up as familiar to English psychological and supernatural horror as teenagers at a summer camp is to the American slasher: near Christmas, a well-off middle-aged couple, Rachel and Edmund (Anna Cropper and Edward Petherbridge), decides to spend the weekend at their country home far outside of London, inviting another couple, Margaret and Dan (Sylvia Kay and Clive Swift), to join them for the usual entertainment of copious food, wine, and banal conversation. Once they have safely arrived, the drab talk commences, revolving exclusively around Rachel and Edmund's blathering about their attempts at renovating the musty old house while Margaret and Dan offer snide compliments and condolences over having picked up this obvious bargain of a property. (Margaret snaps about her distaste for those couples she knows who live in posh London flats during the week and then insist on "living like cavemen on the weekends" in the rustic country without the amenities and modernization that Rachel and Edmund have at least attempted to install in their new rural getaway.)

As the inane conversations progress, we then hear Edmund and Dan trade off pithy quips about their skewed notion of Marxist theory and their mutual adherence to the notion that they must "concentrate on how to be socialists and rich." Because if you're thrust into a bourgeois society (and happen to land near the top of the social heap), you may as well make the most of your situation, however much you may resent it on philosophical grounds, right? The hypocrisy and bizarre but "rational" cognitive dissonance of this cast of pampered buffoons would be sickening if it weren't so comedic: we learn at dinner that Edmund has installed a spotlight above the dining table that shines directly down onto his carving plate, imbuing the feast with an opulent dramatic flair. The sight inspires Dan to guffaw at the difficulty Edmund should have in calling himself a socialist when in possession of such an extravagant set-up, immediately before uncorking his own expensive, decades-old bottle of Burgundy.

When the house's lights and phone die out for no discernible reason, the slow burn of audience irritation with these couples evolves into a darkly comedic pathos as supernatural happenings begin to spoil their enjoyment of their privileged luxuries: Edmund describes the wine as tasting unmistakably like blood, Dan and Margaret find the turkey to feel like fire in their guts, and Rachel discovers the skeletal corpse of a child soiling her bed's linen before vanishing. Ever the narcissists, the foursome attempt to rationally explain away the paranormal activity as individualized mass hysteria, or a shared distortion of perception affecting each of them in different ways. "We must be a very strong-minded lot," quips Dan after their "mass hallucination" prevents Edmund from being able to shatter a glass window pane with a hammer. The house and its ghost, frustrated with the couples' exceedingly "rational" inability to take a hint, decide to make their displeasure glaringly apparent. Tremors shake the set, causing the recently installed plaster walls to crumble and fall, revealing the cold, ancient brick that lies buried underneath. In this moment, the house physically rejects the structural improvements that Edmund and Rachel have used to conceal and ignore the history contained within. In another sense, the house is also rejecting the abhorrent presence of its new owners, making the exorcism of the film's title an ironic reversal of genre expectations: sometimes the spirits need to exorcise us.

Refusing to have its story erased along with the house, the film's ghost comes forward to address the intruders, taking momentary possession of the psychically sensitive Rachel to tell its sad tale. Through her medium, we learn that this phantasm was a poor widow of a past century who died of starvation in the house along with her children. The fortunes of the once modestly prosperous country town they lived in took a harrowing turn for the worse after the richer citizens packed up and moved their homes and business to the cities, leaving poverty and famine to wreak havoc among those unfortunate souls unable to follow suit (the woman, her soon-to-be late husband, and her children included). After her husband was executed for stealing food to feed his family, the woman ran to the town's squire (who was one of its remaining vestiges of affluence) to plead charity for her starving children. She was yelled at and chased away, but before leaving the property she crept around the squire's house and spied through a window the sight of him and his family partaking of a gluttonous feast, filled with meat, wine, and music (and so resembling that being held by our contemporary characters). What possible excuse, the ghost wails through Rachel, could justify the feast when "on the same planet, in the same village, people are starving"? Though this monologue veers into heavy-handedness-- overlong as it is and with its proclamations of the world's injustices as proof of the absence of God-- it also possesses a curious and affecting poetic power. The characters' upstairs discovery of the ghostly sunken corpses of the dead woman and her starved children locked in a dying embrace, along with their subsequent understanding of their personal karmic ills and the hunger-for-a-hunger retribution they must receive from beyond the grave in recompense, gives credence to the vengeful ghost's despairing words (as spoken through her medium) about the the earth's perpetually divided and violent social foundations: "This world is man's work. I recognize it by the bloodstains."

Yet as often as the script tips its hand, the film itself remains restrained and elusive. Largely without an ambient soundtrack, the setting is engulfed in a sense of emptiness and vacancy, befitting the characters' pronouncement after the supernatural force has taken hold of them that the world outside is nothing but darkness and silence. The only pieces of music played throughout the running time are those that are occasionally played on the modernized parlor's anachronistic clavichord, its antiquated strains of baroque melodies underlining the lingering presence of the home's ancient history despite the new tenants' every effort at "improvement." 

Featuring a small, single-set location, a limited cast of actors, and a preponderance of dialogue over action, the film's visual style (like much of '70s British TV drama) takes its cues from the theatre by using the camera to capture long, largely static takes of the various conversations that transpire, the frame alternating between close-ups and long shots depending upon where an audience member's gaze would naturally be drawn. The few violations of this visual approach are striking for their difference and impart an amusingly cynical import to those unexpected images captured. Chief among these illuminating visual surprises is a cut between the climax of the ghostly action and a slow zoom into the face of the parlor's television set, that (at the time) prime symbol of middle class frivolousness and excess in contrast to lower class poverty and starvation. The implication for the audience watching "The Exorcism" in 1972 on their very own television sets in their comfortable English households was, of course, the complicity and guilt they share with those drab, superficial characters they were just recently snickering at on screen. We all tune in to tune out the rest of the world, the film reminds us privileged few, but those abused, hungry masses of history outside preparing to claw at our doors certainly haven't forgotten about us.