The Skull (1965)

“Christopher Maitland sat back in his chair before the fireplace and fondled the binding of an old book. His thin face, modelled by the flickering firelight, bore a characteristic expression of scholarly preoccupation. 

Maitland’s intellectual curiosity was focussed on the volume in his hands. Briefly, he was wondering if the human skin binding this book came from a man, a woman, or a child. 

(…) It was nice to have a book bound in a woman’s skin. It was nice to have a crux ansata fashioned from a thigh-bone; a collection of Dyack heads; a shrivelled hand of Glory stolen from a graveyard in Mainz. Maitland owned all these items, and many more. For he was a collector of the unusual.” 

The Skull is one Amicus’ first horror films. Coming hot on the heals of their first portmanteau flick, Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors, this is actually a feature length movie though ironically based on a short story, The Skull of the Marquis de Sade, by Robert Bloch, i.e. the kind of material that they would later typically use for the anthology productions.

Horror films about obsessive collectors are a fascinating sub-genre that have very rarely been explored outside of Amicus where Robert Bloch appears to have been the driving force behind that niche (see also “The Man Who Collected Poe” segment of Torture Garden).

For The Skull Milton Subotsky co-adapted Bloch’s screenplay about an esoteric collector (Peter Cushing) who starts a descent into murder and madness when he is being offered the genuine skull of the Marquis De Sade.

Though the movie by and large follows the general plot of the short story to the point where certain lines of dialogue are even lifted verbatim, given the requirements of a feature length production there are added sections that are virtually dialogue free in which the film truly shines.

For these scenes director Freddie Francis managed to create some memorable bravura images that clearly demonstrate the cinematographic skill that would ultimately lead to him winning an Oscar. (Official Director of Photography here was John Wilcox.)

A Gothic pre-credits scene is bathed in a very Bavaesque light and depictures a silent, moody grave robbing. At one stage everything is filmed from the point-of-view of the corpse. It appears as if the corpse was lying in a glass tomb and could look through it to see the dirt removed from the coffin.

The film has lots of those strange angles and we often get to see everything from the perspective of the skull, a type of imagery that Alfred Vohrer was also very fond of in German Edgar Wallace Krimis at the time.

Long periods without sound or talk other than musical cues and purely visual imagery dominate this production that is also chock-a-block with little unnerving details such as somewhat distorted mirror reflections or bizarre camera angles.

The most famous of these scenes is midway through and could have been taken straight out of TV’s AVENGERS series: Maitland appears to get arrested and is brought to a Kafkaesque location, a large but mainly empty room only presided over by a judge surrounded by demonic statuettes who communicates through mute sign language and forces him to play a game of Russian Roulette, probably the most drawn out one prior to Deer Hunter. Maitland afterwards escapes through a maze of red corridors, and is threatened by gas and crushing walls while the skull is seen floating through the air. It’s a wonderfully filmed surreal nightmarish vision that vastly improves on the short story’s equivalent which features a rather more conventional form of torture by Iron Maiden.

The visual opulence of this production is furthermore highlighted by some of the most stunning set designs to be found in a 1960s horror production (courtesy of Scott Slimon and Bill Constable).

The characters all live in individually styled surroundings emphasizing their various collecting interests: Maitland’s library; an opulent billiard room with tribal masks; a phrenologist’s apartment featuring a range of masks and dragons as well as lots of books, crystal balls and skulls; the paintings in the shady dealer’s room.

According to Deborah DelVecchio and Tom Johnson in Peter Cushing: The Gentle Man of Horror and his 91 Films all this was filmed in Shepperton Studios “on one composite set which consisted of five rooms and a hallway”.

The Skull is probably the closest we have to a Cushing/Lee-Team-Up in which Peter Cushing plays a Baddy against Christopher Lee’s Good Guy though Cushing’s character is never inherently evil just involuntarily under an evil influence. (And Lee is not really a Goody, just scared and not-evil.) In actual fact the film ramps up the body-count in comparison to the original short story where there were decidedly less killings and none of which were cause by Maitland. 

The film is a major tour-de-force for Cushing who features in the vast majority of the scenes and often is required to silently act within the confines of a dialogue-free atmospheric scenery.

The only other two actors in this production with any decent screen-time to speak off are Patrick Wymark as a wonderfully sleazy procurator of artefacts and Christopher Lee as a friend and fellow-collector who first of all gets embroiled in a bidding war over some demonic figurines and afterwards wants nothing more to do with them. It’s rare that we ever hear fear in Lee’s voice but this is one of the few occasions where he is made to portray a man at the end of his tethers.

Also watch out for Michael Gough as an auctioneer and Patrick Magee and Nigel Green as a coroner and police officer, all three in tiny blink-or-you-miss-them short appearances that beg the question why so many reasonably well known actors at the time constantly show up in what amount to little more than extra parts at that stage in their careers.

All in all, The Skull is one of Amicus’ best productions if not even THE best. Though the studio is mainly known for their portmanteau movies, it required a feature length adaptation of a short story to help them properly unleash a highly atmospheric feast. Some may consider this to be a bit short on actual horror but for me this is one of the most intriguing visual treats the studio had to offer.

Sherlock Holmes: The Case of the Perfect Husband

I recently went to a car boot sale and purchased a box set of 25 episodes of the 1954/55 TV show "Sherlock Holmes", a US TV show produced by Sheldon Reynolds and shot in France. It featured Ronald Howard as Sherlock Holmes and Howard Marion-Crawford as Watson.

I am now gradually working my way through it. They may not be the most canonical films ever but they are a lot of fun and at a little over 25 minutes never overstay their welcome. A good number of the shows are also available through Archive.org and YouTube.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that one of the episodes, The Case of the Perfect Husband, featured Michael Gough in a tremendous role as a deliciously malicious Bluebeard who announces his intention to kill his wife to her with 24-hour notice. Great stuff and love that suit!

(I am embedding the three parts of the YouTube video but you can also see it in one piece at the Archive. Trouble with the Archive version is that I can embed it but not modify it to suit Blogger's page size.)

RIP Michael Gough, 1917-2011

Over at Carfax Abbey last November, I combined my obituary of Ingrid Pitt with a birthday tribute to Michael Gough, who had then just turned 94.
Alas, now it is Gough's own turn for the solemn farewell.

Elsewhere I have called him one of the true unsung heroes of the British horror film, and it seems certain to me that we should think of him in relation to Lee and Cushing in the same sort of way that we think of Zucco or Atwill or Carradine in relation to Karloff and Lugosi. Like those men he was a reliable supporting presence in prestige horrors, a beautifully uninhibited star turn in the more cheap and cheerful varieties, and outside of the genre entirely, a talented and respected character actor.
His two Hammer Horror roles highlight this dichotomy, and stand as excellent tribute to his gifts.
In Dracula his resourceful Arthur Holmwood makes an excellent partner to Cushing's Van Helsing, his early mistrust of the eccentric vampirologist (as seen in the powerful scene in which, grief-stricken after Lucy's death, he tries to rudely dismiss him from the room) giving way to respect and friendship as he grasps the true nature of the danger to his friends and family, and joins Cushing in his crusade.
By contrast, as Lord Ambrose D'Arcy, the chop-licking villain of The Phantom of the Opera (above), he is a wonderfully malevolent presence: petty, vindictive, brutal, a sexual predator, and prepared to lie, cheat and destroy in pursuit of success. Gough comes at the role running, with his hair greased back and nostrils flaring, making the man - though a grotesque of near-Tod Slaughter proportions - nonetheless convincingly unpleasant with his propensity for drunken lechery, callous indifference to suffering and sudden explosions of rage. It is a measure of his excellence in the role that we feel cheated when deined the splashy death scene we have so long been anticipating for his character!

If you want to see him in charge of a whole show, look to his several collaborations with Herman Cohen, who used him rather as PRC used George Zucco. Like Zucco, Gough seems to love the opportunity to seize the main spotlight and really let rip, in an unforgettable gallery of mad scientists, psychopathic deviants and perverts.
Truly, he was one of the most important and cherishable figures in British horror.

(Matthew Coniam)

Michael Gough in CANDIDATE FOR MURDER (Edgar Wallace Mystery Theatre)

I recently posted some screen caps from Hazel Court's Merton Park Wallace THE MAN WHO WAS NOBODY. Michael Gough was also in one those films. CANDIDATE FOR MURDER features him as a jealous husband hiring a German contract killer to off his wife but the killer has his own plans. It's probably one of the best Merton Park Wallaces around and well worth searching for.

Herman Cohen: An American Weirdo in London

by Matthew Coniam

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It’s 1959.

Hammer’s Gothic horrors have only just gotten underway and already, here we are, in present-day London.

Here is a red London bus, and here is a red London post van.
The van stops outside a row of elderly Edwardian terraced houses, sectioned into flats. This is not rural Transylvania, or one hundred years ago in a mountain village in Switzerland. It could be the real world the audience is headed back to when the movie ends, redressed in the sickly primaries of the Eastmancolor palette.
The postman gets out, rings a doorbell, and the door is answered by a busty blonde, cut somewhat imprecisely in the image of Diana Dors. She takes a parcel from him, thanks him, calls him “dearie”.
We go inside to the flat she shares with a little French brunette, accented and perky, perhaps a language student, perhaps an au pair. The package contains a pair of binoculars, and the blonde walks to the window to try them out. The brunette turns to observe, and screams. The blonde has crumpled to the floor, her hands are clasped tight over her face, and there is blood seeping through her fingers, a garish, paint-thick Eastmancolor soup. The discarded binoculars are on the floor beside her, a pair of metal spikes jutting from them, and collecting in a pool on the carpet underneath: more of that blood. Drip, drip, drip...

.This is Horrors of the Black Museum. For Hammer, its inspiration, it was a declaration of war – and proof that they had accidentally kick-started something they would not be able to control. For Anglo-Amalgamated, its producers, it was the first of a notorious trio of modern-dress horrors that aimed to beat Hammer at their own game and resulted instead in a plague of journalistic outrage. (The others were Peeping Tom and Circus of Horrors.)

But for Herman Cohen – the film’s producer and co-writer it was a calling-card: an eccentric new force in British horror had arrived.

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Born in Detroit in 1928, Cohen was a film fanatic from infancy, becoming a cinema usher at 12 and graduating to salesman and film exhibitor. By 24 he was an associate producer, with Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla (1952) to show for his labours. It began a lifelong relationship with men in gorilla suits.
By the following year he had formed Herman Cohen Productions, and released Target Earth!, in which Chicago is invaded by Venusians, in 1954. A team-up with AIP was inevitable, and the results defined an era: I Was a Teenage Frankenstein and I Was a Teenage Werewolf (both 1957), Blood of Dracula (1958, and don’t let the title deceive: it’s about a high-school girl who becomes a vampire with enormous black eyebrows and hair that resembles an afro hacked into some vague approximation of a Lugosi widow’s-peak) and How To Make a Monster (1958), shot on the AIP lot, where a disgruntled make-up designer, on the scrapheap when his studio switches from horror films to musicals, uses his creations – including the teenage Frankenstein (still played by Gary Conway) and the teenage werewolf (no longer played by Michael Landon, who had gone on to Bonanza) – to murder the studio heads.
By this time Cohen had garnered sufficient clout to take offices in London’s Wardour Street, a stone’s throw from Hammer House (which is why a packing-case is addressed there in I Was a Teenage Frankenstein). He began full-scale British production with a haunted house comedy called The Headless Ghost (1959). It made little impact, but Horrors of the Black Museum was just around the corner.

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At its heart, the film was more or less a remake of How To Make a Monster, again featuring a dedicated professional in a disreputable industry hypnotising their assistants into killing off their oppressors. (In fact, the film that Monster’s villain is working on is actually called Horrors of the Black Museum!) But this time the looney is a true crime writer (Michael Gough, for Cohen what Cushing was to Hammer) who stages the crimes he then writes bestsellers about. (One is called The Poetry of Murder.) “There’s no doubt we’re dealing with a brilliant maniac!” the police exclaim.
Hammer Horror was scarcely a welcome new phenomenon at the BBFC, but this was something more again. Secretary John Trevelyan (in his memoir What the Censor Saw) recalled it as not “a standard horror film” but instead “both sadistic and nasty”. He particularly disliked the binoculars (“Of course we had to see the blood trickling down her face”), especially since Cohen made a point of boasting that the contraption was based on one used in a real British murder case.
Even grimmer is the film’s other showpiece murder, of Gough’s mistress, who has made the fatal mistake of laughing once too often at his walking stick. We watch her come home, undress to her girdle, stockings and suspenders, and then lie invitingly on her bed… whereupon she is decapitated by a guillotine blade above her pillow.
Despite a British setting and a British director (Arthur Crabtree, once a leading light at Gainsborough Studios) the film’s heritage is unmistakably that of Cohen’s drive-in past, with funfairs, tunnels of love, hypnotism, and a snarling AIP-ish killer, his murderous fits accompanied by an unexplained facial transformation, leaping to his death from the top of a big wheel. There was even the claim that it was shot in ‘Hypnovista’: US audiences got a six minute prologue ostensibly explaining its marvels.
Next, the ape-suit got a dusting-off for Konga (1960), still for Anglo-Amalgamated, but as different in tone from Horrors as conceivable. Michael Gough is a professor with a Lily Munster white streak and the hots for sweater girl Claire Gordon, who develops a growth serum that enables him to create giant plastic carnivorous plants that eat kippers and transform a chimp into a man in a gorilla costume. The ape goes on the rampage, trampling miniature sets and clutching a stiff wooden doll standing in for our mad Mike. This time the phony process is ‘Spectamation’ and the title was originally to have been I Was a Teenage Gorilla.

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After a brief return to America for 1963’s Black Zoo (made not for AIP but for Allied Artists, the former Monogram, with Gough still on board as a zookeeper who hypnotises his animals to kill and serenades them on his Hammond organ), Cohen came back to England to set up Fog, a film he had devised as an encounter between Sherlock Holmes and Jack the Ripper. Learning that Tony Tenser and Michael Klinger had something similar in mind, the two parties agreed magnanimously to pool resources on what would become A Study in Terror (1965). It was probably the classiest product with which Cohen, credited solely as executive producer, was ever associated.

Next up were his lunatic collaborations with Joan Crawford, luminous former princess of MGM and Warners, whose sensational comeback in Whatever Happened To Baby Jane? had condemned her to a twilight in cheapie horror films. With a couple of collaborations with William Castle already behind her it was perhaps inevitable that Cohen would come calling.

First was Berserk! (1967), an aptly-named big top melodrama with Joan as the ringmaster (the part had been written for a man so it’s ideal for Joan), Diana Dors getting sawn in half and Gough – innocent this time – having a tent-peg hammered into his head in one of the film’s several logically-impossible killings. The identity of the killer does come as a genuine surprise, however, so if you don’t want to know that it’s Judy Geeson, look away now. It’s Judy Geeson.

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But seven years was a long time for Cohen to go without using a man in an ape suit, so both it and Crawford were pressed back into service for Trog (1970), the first of two Cohen films to use proper director Freddie Francis. Joan finds a frozen troglodyte in a cave, thaws it out and teaches it to catch a ball in her garden; nasty Michael Gough sets it loose on a murder spree. (For more on Cohen’s collaborations with Crawford, see here.)

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Cohen’s final British production could well be his weirdest: which, if you’ve seen any of his others, you’ll know is no idle boast.

Craze (1973) stars Jack Palance, an excitable actor at the best of times, here left to run riot by Cohen and Francis, as an antiques-dealer compelled to arrange blood sacrifices for an African idol that rewards murders with money and to which he chants in Latin. No Gough this time, but surely only Cohen could have talked Trevor Howard and Edith Evans into taking thankless support roles in this joyous farrago.

This film simply makes no sense at all: at least in Cohen's earlier titles the abundance of drive-in excess - the gorillas, the hypnosis, the mad special effects - never let you forget that what you were seeing was basically just a romp. But this plays straight - it could be Amicus or Tigon at a push - yet the thing itself obeys no rules, either of cinema or of logic. It's like a madman's dream.

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Herman Cohen produced some of the craziest horror films ever produced in Britain, flipping an oddly invigorating bird to the occasionally po-faced Gothic seriousness of Hammer. His films really couldn’t be any sillier had that been their specific aim, but all are supremely entertaining and Horrors of the Black Museum, almost despite itself, remains a highly important milestone in the story of British horror. Cohen, who died in 2002, can rest content with that.