Demons of the Mind (1972)

This late Hammer Film unusually blends their familiar Mittel Europaer settings with a plot that applies primitive psychiatry to demonology in order to take slightly more seriously many of the clichés of gothic horror. It comes from a period when Hammer (and their competitors) were casting around for various ways of keeping the product up to date, most obviously through added explicit sex and violence but also through a modish, almost cynical rethink of the basic premises. The convention of the village mob bearing torches as they attack the castle and the Van Helsing-style scientific-religious savants usually played by Peter Cushing are put through the ringer, so that the villagers are chanting throwbacks as happy with rituals of petty sadism involving burned scarecrows as with murdering monsters, while the savants are represented by Patrick Magee as a cracked mesmerist failing to help anyone and Michael Hordern as a ranting, mumbling itinerant priest .

There's a curse on the House of Zorn. Baron Friedrich (Robert Hardy, with sidewhiskers) is torn between accepting a supernatural explanation and trying for a scientific cure for the hereditary madness that is afflicting his strange children, Elisabeth (Gillian Hills) and Emil (Shane Briant). Sundry village girls are murdered and sunk in the lake by a devoted servant (Kenneth J. Warren) and a long-haired scholar (Paul Jones) tries to get involved with Elisabeth, who occasionally escapes from the supervision of her father and her unusual aunt (Yvonne Mitchell). Christopher Wicking's literate script builds slowly into a credibly messy horror finale involving multiple tragedies and a huge burning cross, while director Sykes takes the the procedings unusually seriously, getting close to striking faces. Shot by Arthur Grant, it has a paler colour scheme than most contemporary British horror films, with drabber decor but more striking props and costumes - like Briant's odd orange blouse and Magee's purple dressing gown, or the sadistic period medical gadgets and Magee's glass-tubes-and-liquids mesmeric apparatus. Hardy's rather stiff central performance lacks the nuance that his co-stars uniformly bring to their roles, but he still convinces as a rigid man close to cracking up.

Wicking and Sykes clearly put a lot of extra effort into this movie, and they credit veteran producer Frank Godwin with pushing Hammer into new areas; perhaps because of its lack of ‘cult' stars and perhaps because it mounts something of an attack on its genre, it has never quite managed to secure its reputation.
KIM NEWMAN

First published in this form here.

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