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 Blood Beast Terror (1968)

It just wouldn’t be Halloween without at least one British horror movie starring Peter Cushing in a lead role. Apparently Cushing considered The Blood Beast Terror (US title The Vampire Beast Craves Blood, and we can only hope that whoever came up with these titles lived a happy, contented life knowing that they made the world a brighter place) the worst movie he ever worked on in his long and storied career—of course I can’t definitively state whether that’s true or not, as I haven’t seen every one of his movies. Among the ones I have seen, there have been excellent ones (The Abominable Snowman, Horror Express), solid ones (Island of Terror), and interesting but flawed ones (The Creeping Flesh)—Blood Beast is probably the least interesting of these, the one that feels the most like a procedural monster movie, but that’s not to say it isn’t interesting at all. As has been the case many times before, while it proceeds in a predictable manner, all the little details (or, in some cases, the lack of details) build up a pleasingly melodramatic mix of Victorian moralism and Gothic ghoulishness.

Island of Terror (1966)

The theme for this week’s double feature turned out to be “monsters that suck.”

If there’s one thing I’m learning from watching so many of these British horror films from the fifties and sixties, it’s that they all seem to gradually escalate in terms of luridness—that was one of the things that distinguished Hammer’s output (such as previous subject X the Unknown), and other studios seemed to take on the challenge of pushing the shock value further. 1966 is pretty late in the game for this type of movie, but Planet Films still lived up to the lineage of UK creature features with Island of Terror, which was directed by genre pioneer Terence Fisher, who had also directed Hammer’s classic Gothic re-imaginings of Frankenstein and Dracula, as well as a few Sci-Fi flicks for good measure (the credits also inform us that the “Costume Artiste” is named Bunty.) Being a British horror movie made in this time period, it also features Peter Cushing in a starring role as a scientist (I’d imagine Fisher was probably among his most frequent collaborators)—or, I guess in this case, a medical doctor. Close enough! You might have a pretty good idea of how the story of this movie goes, but the imagery and tone of it will still find ways to throw you for a loop.

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.

The Abominable Snowman (1957)

A lot of very important monster history is to be found in 1957’s The Abominable Snowman (which sometimes has Of the Himalayas in the title): it’s one of the notable Hammer Films thrillers released before they went all-in on lurid Gothic horror in the late fifties, and it’s also another Hammer production co-written by legendary British television writer Nigel Kneale, based on his own earlier BBC drama, after the studio found success adapting Kneale’s Quatermass stories. Kneale produced some incredibly influential pieces of television and film science fiction and horror from the fifties to the seventies, stories with sober intelligence and fascinating existential themes about humanity and its place in the universe. Abominable Snowman is another example of that, taking the search for the elusive Himalayan hominid (which was in the public consciousness again in the fifties after the Everest climbs of Eric Shipton and Sir Edmund Hillary and the accompanying footprint photographs) and using it as a vehicle to examine the nature of our own species. This is a deliberate and atmospheric movie, one that actually takes the implication of the subject matter seriously.

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.