The other British studio to specialise in Horror in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, Amicus, could never quite offer productions as well-conceived and solidly produced as Hammer’s, and the series of Milton Subotsky and Max J. Rosenberg-produced omnibus films generally offered sketch-like, dime-store vivacity as well as generic cheesiness. After Dr Terror’s House of Horrors (1964), which Subotsky and Rosenberg wrote themselves, they turned to Robert Bloch, who adapted many of his old short stories into screen tales hanging from a negligible framework narrative. Where Dr Terror and first successor Torture Garden
Perhaps, thanks to its title, the most famous of the Amicus productions, House is, like most omnibus films not called Kwaidan – and I’m including distant ancestor, Dead of Night (1945) in this – too flimsy in structure to truly compel and unnerve, and Amicus’ slapdash production doesn’t help much. Duffel’s direction is mostly tamed and hemmed in by the low budget and barely contiguous narrative, sporting only occasional flurries of strong imagery. He does gamely satirise his own inexperience in the film’s final chapter, “The Cloak” in which Jon Pertwee’s hammy horror star Paul Henderson, a self-declared genre aficionado, berates modern horror films, and his fresh-from-TV director. The house of the title is a decaying Victorian mansion, and a police detective, Holloway (John Bennett), investigating the disappearance of Henderson
In the first episode, “Method for Murder”, Denholm Elliott’s murder-mystery writer Charles Hillyer moves into the house with his sickly sweet wife Alice (Johanna Dunham) and dreams up a strangler character, Dominick, who soon begins appearing to him. His wife sends him to a psychiatrist after she swears that an assault on her, which Charles thought was being committed by Dominick, was actually done by Charles himself. This leads to a wryly surreal moment in which the psychiatrist (Robert Lang) assures Charles it’s all in his head as Dominick sneaks up behind him and strangles him. Of course, it’s really a plot, engineered by Alice and her actor lover (Tom Adams), to set up Charles, but the persona of Dominick finally proves to have overtaken the actor too.
The second episode, “Waxworks”, sees a retired stockbroker (Peter Cushing) take over the house, and he and his visiting friend (Joss Ackland) both become fascinated by a Salome figure in a waxworks in the nearby town, which tantalisingly resembles a woman they had both loved years before. The figure proves to be the embalmed body of the waxworks’ proprietor’s (Wolfe Morris) wife, still attracting men with her temptress soul long after death, provoking the proprietor to murder all who are transfixed by her. This is easily the most negligible episode, failing utterly to communicate lingering totemistic/fetishistic obsession, with a lame object of waxen affection, to make it more than a penny dreadful punchline.
The fourth episode, with its overt self-satire, usually gets all the attention, with Henderson Henderson
The first and last stories reference that self-reflexive strain in a lot of horror literature that Stephen King has taken to the nth degree in tales like The Dark Tower and Secret Window, with fictional characters coming to life and that wheezy old idea of the actor’s part taking over his life. They gain most of their pep from the actors, especially Elliott, who was great at essaying febrile fearfulness (see To The Devil…A Daughter), and Cushing and Ackland buoy their episode with good work (and a reminder that Duffel got a gem of a performance out of Ackland three years later in England Made Me). Pertwee has a ball as the conceited actor, mustering much the same energetic humour he offered in his stint in Doctor Who.
But it’s the third story, “Sweets for the Sweet”, that’s both the most low-key and interesting, featuring Christopher Lee as a stern father who’s terrified of the possibility his young daughter (Chloe Franks) might prove to be a witch like her mother. He moves into the house and cuts her off from all contact with other children, hiring instead a tutor (Nyree Dawn Porter) for her. But the very thing he means to keep in check soon claims him victim when his little girl, obeying encyclopaedia instructions, and, possibly her mother’s communing spirit, builds a wax effigy of her father and takes dainty delight in torturing him with needle pricks. It’s a memorable psychodrama that presents a terse parable for family perversion, patriarchal repression and resurgent feminine will entwined in a vicious dance, climaxing with Lee’s horrid screams echoing as his effigy melts in the fire. In this episode, Bloch and Duffel comes close to a minor genre landmark.
