The Corpse [1970]

Made in 1969, this odd little domestic horror melodrama wasn't released until 1972 [it floated around the circuits for years on a double bill with a US import, Psycho Killer]. In many ways, it's the most British of all horror films, locating monstrosity in the commuter belt mansion and week-end getaway cottage of a stock-broker who rules his family like a Victorian patriarch, seething with barely-repressed incestuous desire for his sixteen-year-old daughter, making a zombie-like slave of his frustrated artist wife and raising his toadying son to become a miniature of himself.

As Walter Eastwood, the tyrant of Richmond, Michael Gough gets one of his best villain roles, never hamming as wildly as in his Herman Cohen credits [Horrors of the Black Museum, Konga, etc] and even trying out the dead act he reprises in The Legend of Hell House. Walter furtively fondles his daughter's warm bicycle seat and takes a willow switch to her when a golf club crony accuses her of stealing from the safe, surveys his dinner table with lizardy eyes as he reads love letters the garage boy has sent the girl ['written with a biro ... full of grammatical errors'] and secretly relishes every opportunity for perversion and misery. When his wife Edith and daughter Jane tell him they have read the Marquis de Sade to help understand him, he explodes in fury that his women should be exposed to such pornographic filth and yet is clearly delighted when their murder attempt allows him to perpetrate even more torment upon them.

It is a mark of the film's modest ambition that rather than the duff supporting casts Cohen gave Gough, he is partnered with the excellent Yvonne Mitchell, an icon of female desperation from Woman in a Dressing Gown, and allowed to have his own son Simon as Walter's son Rupert. Much of the dramatic weight of the film falls on the interesting Sharon Gurney, who later landed the heroine role in Death Line and not much else, as the schoolgirl daughter Walter has repressed but also trained to be an amoral thief and perhaps killer. After half an hour of unreasonable behaviour, Edith urgently whispers to Jane 'let's kill him ... I'm not joking', and the two women scheme to set up a fake suicide at the cottage where Walter takes his week-ends [he's big on grouse-shooting]. After a shotgun confrontation ['you've gone mad', 'no, though I sometimes suspected I would'], the women drug Walter and hope he'll die, then go through one of those awkward midnight corpse-disposal scenes.

The film's debt to Les Diaboliques, most oft-imitated of thrillers, becomes apparent when Walter is not found, and evidence piles up to suggest that he isn't dead - reports of phone calls, tidied crime scenes, and Trouble With Harry-ish appearances of the apparent corpse. Though suitably nerve-shredding, this is the least effective stretch of the movie, if only because an indebtedness to earlier films gives the big revelation away too early. The finale, with Walter resuming his position at the head of the table, and his womenfolk even more downtrodden than before, is actually far creepier than all the sudden attacks and staring-eyed bodies.

The Corpse was directed by Viktors Ritelis, who had done Sherlock Holmes episodes on television, produced by Gabrielle Beaumont, who later directed The Godsend and much US TV [Star Trek, etc], and written by familiar character actor Olaf Pooley [The Gamma People, Doctor Who: Inferno, etc], who pops up as a country neighbour who visits the cottage with his eager dog just after the murder. The camerawork and editing are a little tricksy, even for 1969, with colour negative dream scenes, Marienbad-flash memory snippets [Walter punishing Jane after a nude swim] and rack-focused tree-branches, but there's an eerie score, heavy on the onde martinot, from John Hotchkis.
KIM NEWMAN

First Published In: Ten Years of Terror

Visit Kim's Official Website at www.johnnyalucard.com