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.

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.