The Gorgon (1964)

If you were dismayed by the non-appearance of Peter Cushing and/or Christopher Lee in the Halloween season movies this year—don’t worry, I have you all covered.

The Gorgon has an unusual backstory: fearing that they were potentially stuck in a rut, Hammer Productions decided to take an idea sent to them by a Canadian fan named J. Llewyn Divine and assigned some of their lead writers, John Gilling and Anthony Nelson Keyes, to polish it into a full feature directed by Hammer’s go-to man, Terence Fisher. I think I can understand why a fan of Hammer’s movies would pitch this concept, and why Hammer themselves would be intrigued by it: after reviving most of the “classic” literary monster—a Dracula, a Frankenstein, a mummy, a werewolf, even things like the Phantom of the Opera and Dr. Jekyl/Mr. Hyde—moving in the direction of classical mythology is the next best source of recognizably scary faces, such as the snake-haired, petrifying Gorgons of Greek legend. It seems quite obvious, in fact. A less obvious approach is taking a recognizable monster from Greek mythology and somehow transplanting it to a turn-of-the-century European setting with a ready supply of Gothic manors and spooky forests—to, in essence, make this bold new concept into a Hammer movie, complete with Peter Cushing and Christoper Lee in major roles. I guess they just couldn’t resist the pull of what had worked before, even when they were trying to! Much as in the Lovecraft adaptations that AIP gussied up to resemble Edgar Allan Poe adaptations, it makes for an unusual aesthetic contortion.

The Creeping Flesh (1973)

Continuing the trend of returning to old favourites, we’ve got another Peter Cushing/Christopher Lee joint, one that premiered a year after they appeared together in Horror Express. The Creeping Flesh is a proper British Gothic horror, a period piece full of parlours and lacy clothes and laboratories and grotty asylums, directed by a longtime hand at the genre, Freddie Francis (who apparently replaced Don Sharp, another British horror director), an Academy Award-winning cinematographer who also made several thrillers for rival studios Hammer and Amicus (this one is by the other other UK horror studio, Tigon) and apparently wasn’t that big a fan of the genre. In any case, here he is with Cushing and Lee, reversing the roles they had in Horror Express—Cushing is the one with more scruples this time!—in this weird combination of evolutionary science, psychiatry, and timeless supernatural evil. Whatever point Flesh is trying to make is embedded in layers of pseudo-scientific theorizing and even Victorian gender politics, and some of those ideas are implemented so subtly that it’s hard to tell if I’m just projecting them in there myself. This is a truly perplexing object.

Horror Express (1972)

This really does feel like one last hurrah of a particular kind of horror movie, the quaintly lurid and darkly humorous sort that typified the genre in the fifties and sixties. Horror Express has many of the stylistic hallmarks of those films, not the least of which being that it’s a period piece that stars Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing—it even has a science fiction conceit that also feels of the previous era (it was produced by Bernard Gordon, who had a major hand in Earth vs. The Flying Saucers and Day of the Triffids). The early seventies was basically the transition point from these sorts of movies (which had mostly been dominated by Hammer Productions, and mostly starred Lee and Cushing) to more contemporary and hard-edged ones—this came out the same year as Last House on the Left (…and also Frogs), and a year before The Exorcist. It’s pretty clear that something like this wasn’t the kind of terror people were looking for in the theatre. Still, you probably couldn’t have asked for a better send-off than this, which is entertaining and stylish, all the more impressive because Spanish director Eugenio Martin had no previous experience in horror.