Fear in the Night (1972) may be minor Hammer in the scheme of the studio and minor horror in its cast's CVs, but it is the rare slow-burn twist-based thriller that doesn't melt itself down for scrap in the third act and until then it does more than atmospherically mark time. It even manages some surprises, little inclusions of the unexpected. Befitting a genre predicated on warped psychologies, its foreseeable moves are all a little off the beam.
Part Gothic and part giallo, the screenplay by writer-director-producer Jimmy Sangster doesn't just forebode from the start with an eerily deserted glide through the autumn-blown grounds of a school concluding in the macabre enigma of a corpse by the football pitch, it scarcely bothers with establishing a premise when it can slap down its tropes like a misfortune of Tarot. Six months out from the breakdown whose psychiatric sessions intercut the present action like intrusive thoughts, newlywed Peggy Heller (Judy Geeson) hasn't even made it as far as the stockbroker Tudor of the public school where her husband Robert (Ralph Bates) contends with the lower fourth when her quiet evening of packing out her live-in situation is shattered by the terrifying break-in of a black-clad figure of whose assault no trace remains when she comes to, not even the prosthetic arm she wrenched off in her struggle. "No, it's not spoiled. It's just . . ." Not what she hoped for, this whirlwind honeymoon in a picturesquely mod-conned cottage when she wakes in the middle of the night to watch for movements in the ivy-wreathed shadows of the school she will explore by day, her champagne-soured choke-out memories tinting her encounters with the gentle-voiced headmaster Michael Carmichael (Peter Cushing) and his brusquer wife Molly (Joan Collins) whose violently avant-garde sculptures are the discordant note in all the mellow panelled oak and clerestory reflections of school cups. The sounds of a Latin lesson echoing from a classroom with no one in it nudges the question of her sanity, or perhaps only the supernatural. Worse yet, a second visitation by her nighttime strangler provides no vindication when once again she can offer no proof of the attack beyond her distress that does not equal the signs of forced entry or even bruising. Tear-shocked under the weight of her husband's concern, Peggy clings to her terror like dreadful wreckage, disturbed if she does, endangered if she doesn't: "My imagination . . . He kept saying it must have been my imagination. Well, it couldn't have been my imagination. Could it?"
Fear in the Night is far from a film noir, but it leans into much of the same chilly sense of nightmare, the superficially ordinary charged with indescribable dread. To say that the headmaster discoursed on the therapeutic value of knots before addressing himself to the kerchief tangled in the heroine's hair does not convey the disorientating infusion of eroticism and detached courtliness in his manner, the tender vagueness in speaking of his students which may unsettle the audience more than the reveal of his black-gloved artificial hand. "Do you know that is the most difficult part? To make them want to learn?" To call her near-fatal miss by the headmaster's wife out shooting a rude welcome to the rust-brushed parkland underrates the brazenly personal and unaccountable hostility of the interaction, as territorially intimidating as the housewarming gift of the gorily potted rabbit that could just as easily have been Peggy's shining blonde head. "Well, why didn't you say so, my dear? I nearly made a widower out of you, Robert." Despite repeated invitations to dinner, it is impossible to picture them at the same table, a cracked Crocker-Harris, a brutal Diana. Even the never-named school seems to squint in and out of focus, a neglected exterior of moss-sponged brick and discolored plaster, interiorly spotless down to the neatly laid china and the matron-cornered beds, dust-sheeted in the dead days between terms and worth a quarter of a million according to Robert, who jokes wistfully about his own work-shyness compared with his employer's dedication: "I wish I had just half Carmichael's money . . . You do that every time I go off to work and I shan't go off to work." A unicorn of a husband for a frightened woman in cinema, he's supportive despite his acknowledged skepticism of an intruder right out of a horror comic, decisively reaching to ring the police when she reiterates the reality of her attack, but the suspicious viewer could make something of his very attentiveness, especially when it comes with its own lacunae—he refers to the retired maths master who had the cottage before them, but what exactly does he himself teach? The possibility of another strike from a half-mechanical strangler hangs in Chekhov's plain sight like the loaded shotgun in the Land Rover, but the real tension hums through the bare-branched days because even normal human conversations have a habit of skewing off true as if the world itself is slipping like a badly pasted advertisement. Peggy herself makes an unusual choice of woman in peril: she fits the outward profile with her small, fair looks and huge celadon eyes, but she does not give off an automatic sense of fragility or helplessness—she worked successfully as a carer—which means that to watch her terrorized does not register as the natural condition of a horror heroine, it feels violatingly wrong. Under other circumstances, we would not at all be surprised to see her defend herself with the gun she expressed real distaste for, unloading both barrels at point-blank range as if she'd held her own in a slasher movie before. That her efforts against her own panic are rewarded with nothing more than the advance of an apparent dead man behind his glasses splintered blind as some specter out of M. R. James feels like cheating; the question is on whose part.
( It's the end of term. )Sangster had done much to form the iconic image of Hammer in the '50's with his Technicolor-shocker rewrites of Frankenstein and Dracula and
Fear in the Night as his last effort for the studio was a much more subdued affair, although not blandly so. Veteran Hammer DP Arthur Grant gives the school a curiously, simultaneously vacant and vigilant look, so inhabited by absence that it would feel just as natural if it flashed over to ghosts. Shooting in the last rags of fall in Aldenham Country Park and what was just about to become Bhaktivedanta Manor provided a breath-fogged, brackenish palette against which anything bright—like blood—stands sharply out. One early shot of a service station in the mist of a greyed-out day should be merely establishing and feels instead like dissociation on the northbound M1. It fits with the elliptical editing of Peter Weatherley, which cuts actions as closely into one another as lost time until it can catch up at last to that rook-cawed, corpse-cold open in the pure singing of a punch line. Aside from the fact that it was taken years ago by an American
B-noir, the title is almost misleadingly irrelevant, but the commitment of the cast and the odd, bleak artistry of the picture more than compensate for the fact that I would have called it
End of Term. I watched it on
Tubi, but it can be found just as freely on
YouTube and the
Internet Archive; it had gotten onto my radar years ago for Peter Cushing and I was prompted more recently toward it by the presence of Judy Geeson and Ralph Bates. It is small and weird and both qualities count for a lot with me. This end brought to you by my surprising backers at
Patreon.
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